


The Living are Dead, and the Dead are all Living

by sabrina



Category: Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: New Jedi Order Era - All Media Types
Genre: All the relationships are like super background so I don't even know why I'm tagging them tbh, Angst, During that five year journey, Gen, Guys I don't know what got into me tonight but I just had all these Jacen feels so here you are, Post New Jedi Order technically, soul searching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-13
Updated: 2016-09-13
Packaged: 2018-08-14 19:58:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8026951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sabrina/pseuds/sabrina
Summary: Jacen Solo thinking on friends and family alive and dead during his five year journey.





	The Living are Dead, and the Dead are all Living

**Author's Note:**

> There's really no excuse for this except that I just got a bunch of Jacen Solo feels. I think it's the first thing I've ever written from Jacen's PoV. It's a lot of angst. It works in my bisexual Jacen head-canon. And really that's it. Solo kids taking over my life. I love them. 
> 
> Title from the Stars Song 'In Our Bedroom After The War'.

There are nights when he can hear his brother’s voice as clearly as if it were in the room with him. Those are always the nights when he can’t sleep, when the questions have been sated just enough, and when the cultural expectations of wherever he is do not keep his mind occupied. 

Jacen Solo wishes those nights were more frequent. He wishes also that they were further and fewer between. There is no use to them but to remind him that he cannot run so far away to put the galaxy back into place. From here on out it will be forever a landscape permanently altered. 

The ship is his own, the questions his own, the desire for knowledge almost certainly his own – and on the nights when the stars shine most brightly, Jacen can almost believe that nothing at home has changed. He will return one day, sliding back from among the stars, with an understanding of the Force, and the traditions surrounding it, and things will have become what they should be. Alone on the ship, in the absence of everyone he knows, he can believe his brother the Knight and his sister too will be waiting for him. They will both be growing as Knights, serving the Order – both of them with the ability to accept the Jedi and the Jedi Order as the way to serve the Force best. 

Jacen lacks that ability but he will not mock it. Perhaps in his weaker moments he will even be envious of it.

When he returns it is to open arms. In the midst of the night sky on Coruscant, he will sit around an open fire pit, on the top of an open garden in his parents Coruscant apartments. They’ll watch the flames leap towards the stars they cannot see, and they’ll talk into the night. Anakin will want to know every single thing that Jacen has learned. He’ll poke at it, question it, accept some of it, and later come back for more. Jaina will interject here or there, keeping the peace between the two brothers while simultaneously asking her own questions. 

They'll both be proud of what he's learned. Anakin may even want to work pieces of it into the Order. Jaina will want him to show her some technique.

They’ll eat pieces off of boxed sweets until Threepio inevitably asks them if they’ll be retiring soon, or if they still want the fire going. 

For as long as he’s out here alone in the galaxy that’s the homecoming he can have. 

He never really wants to go home. 

The Force is too big. 

It is full of mysteries that Jacen cannot hope to wrap his head around, and yet he still tries. Vergere told him to choose and act, and so he does. When choices arrive, he decides authoritatively, and this is how one night he ends up in the hut on a far moon on the edge of known space. 

There is no power in this village, everything lit by fire, and a simplicity and acceptance within this place. They worship the Force in a way completely unlike anything that Jacen has seen. There is innocence about it, and an acceptance of the power it offers that comes without hesitation or the weight of moral choices. Perhaps this place represents to some degree more than any place he’s found thus far the notion of choice at the center of the use of the Force. 

He is invited to spend the night in the hut, rather than on the ship, and so he does, thoughtful in his inability to communicate with the locals in a super meaningful way, their grasp of basic is non-existent, and Jacen wishes for Threepio. 

Perhaps he should not be surprised when the Village Prince shows up in his hut. He’s a tall man, pale skin, dark hair wrapped up from his face, while small curls escape along his hairline. He doesn’t speak Basic, but he doesn’t need to. When he reaches out and touches Jacen’s hand, turning it over to run fingers softly down Jacen’s palm, Jacen suspects. In the light of the fire he gives himself over to it – seeking knowledge, and new experiences, and instead offering something the chance to bury deep inside his core. 

He leaves that place wiser, or perhaps a little more broken, but in what ways he isn’t sure. 

The emptiness of the ship is the worst. It might not be the _Falcon_ but it reminds him of nights curled into a bunk together, him and Jaina and Anakin. Together they’d cuddle under one of the many blankets in the quarters. Sometimes Chewbacca would come to check on them, and he’d tuck another blanket in around them. Anakin would fall asleep first, and Jaina and Jacen would hold him, protecting him from bad dreams, or the cold of space, always protecting him. 

They failed him once: It feels like a lifetime ago.

On the planets among strangers he can forget those moments, but stuck inside the cockpit while the blue of hyperspace swirls by the glass, he can’t quite do so. They’re still here. Pulled in by a string that reminds Jacen that they aren’t at home either, the homecoming he longs for a mere fantasy less real than a holodrama.

He pushes out into the Force, seeking everything he can learn. When things contradict, he seems to let them go. The Force is large enough to handle uncertainties. It has to be. It’s kept Jacen all these years. 

(Sometimes he wishes for more surety. Sometimes he wishes for a sign to say ‘this is the thing, walk to it’. He can choose, yes, and he will, and he no longer gets caught up in the weight of regrets. But it would be oh so nice if maybe he didn’t have to sometimes. It’s a foolish wish, a childish one, and the time for it is long past.)

Some nights he dreams of places that no longer exist in this way: the Yavin IV Academy, the apartment long ago grown over with purple spores and green slime, and a Jedi temple that he never knew but once spent a nightmare in. 

They are places too familiar, populated with people whose hearts he longs to know, but whom he suspects may not know his. 

‘You can’t be here with me now and I couldn’t be with you.’ 

‘Perhaps that is a fact, or perhaps it is a lie.’

‘You chose this life, Tenel Ka, and I chose mine. I love you, but these are not the choices we made.’

‘Are you certain everything is choices Jacen Solo? And some of it is not destiny?’

‘It isn’t like you to speak of destiny,’ he says. 

A red braid swishes over her shoulder and she flashes white teeth as she reminds him. ‘This isn’t me.’ 

He wakes, covered in sweat, cock hard, with the impending sense of indescribable loss. He pushes his thumbs against his forehead, pressing himself to this moment - it's not real, the loss. It's just a dream. He pushes away the tightness in his chest by dealing with the tightness in his dick. The catharsis of release should be enough to push him back to sleep, but it isn't. He lays awake, long into the darkness, trying not to fear the galaxy is ending.

He cries that night, alone in a bunk, for a life lost long before a moon was pulled into Sernpidal’s surface and a boy was forced to face his destiny. 

Because Jacen Solo does believe in destiny when it comes down to it; He believes in choices too, and he will own every one of his choices, forever and for as long as it takes; He will regret none of them, even if they were not the best he could have made; But destiny moves forces outside of those he could choose, and those things cannot be buried or forgotten. 

His parents, his sister, his brother, the woman he still loves are still watching him. 

‘What do you hope to find?’ 

His brother’s voice is less clear but still there as he waits to be gifted the extraordinary gift of participating in a Force ritual. 

‘Truth,’ Jacen tells him. ‘Truth and how it matters.’

‘The Force is life,’ Anakin’s voice seems so clear. ‘Without the Force life lacks the meaning. What truth do you need?’ 

‘I gave up on not using it,’ Jacen points out, the curl of shame and regret from a time a lifetime ago still pressing in despite his oath to never give in to either. 

‘So you found truth and what other truth do you need?’

‘I’m not satisfied with anything so simple.’ 

‘It’s not simple.’ 

Anakin’s voice echoes through his head throughout the ceremony. He has to focus and concentrate, in order to take the journey through the mind, walking backwards, finding his brother in the room at the academy on Yavin IV – places long gone right here as if he could reach out and touch them. 

The Force is too big. The Force is not simple. Jacen has no regrets. 

Two truths and one lie, or is it two lies and one truth? 

Sometimes Jacen wonders if his grandfather was haunted by darkness. Sometimes Jacen wishes his mother had named him Anakin. That perhaps holding that name would have provided some immunity to the dark that he could have built upon. This is superstition and he doesn’t really believe it except for when he wakes from a vision heart pounding and the impending fear of something hanging in the balance. A dark throne, a dark man, visions that might mean nothing, nothing he should spend too much time obsessing over, visions he cannot chase from his head. 

Is he darkness or light? Neither. He is choices. He is choices made to the best of his ability, with an open heart and longing for truth. The darkness cannot grow there. The darkness requires dark corners, and whispered secrets, and fear, and the hopelessness of despair. And Jacen does not keep those things, not where anyone can see them. 

Instead he keeps confidence, and knowledge, and choices. He will choose to save the galaxy, over and over again if necessary. Remove things if necessary to help it grow. He will choose to know the Force. Alone, or with others, and those things feel like the only ones that really matter.

**Author's Note:**

> If you want to join me on [tumblr](http://jedihafren.tumblr.com/) where I talk a lot about Solo kids from all timelines come on over.


End file.
